Assessing the Cultural Competence of Healthcare Professionals in a Psychiatric Setting

Hospitals, nursing homes, and mental health facilities throughout Rhode Island admit patients from a multitude of cultures on a daily basis. As a result, healthcare professionals are often taking care of patients from backgrounds other than their own. Different groups of people have their own set of norms and unique views regarding medical treatment. How knowledgeable are healthcare workers about certain cultural practices, beliefs, and symptomatology? My goal was to assess the cultural competency of healthcare professionals in a psychiatric and mental health facility in Rhode Island. I chose to focus on the mental health setting instead of a general medical setting. I was interested with the interaction between nurses and other healthcare professionals with psychiatric patients from cultures different than their own. Were the healthcare workers aware of certain types of culture-bound syndromes? Did the nurses feel confident in their ability to distinguish between a cultural-bound syndrome and a psychotic episode? After constructing an informal twenty-question survey, I distributed it to several healthcare professionals at the anonymous psychiatric facility. Participants included registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, mental health workers, and other professional employees. The participants ranged in job experience. Some professionals were relatively new to the psychiatric setting and others had been employed in mental health for over fifteen years. This informal survey served as a tool to assess the degree of cultural competency in this mental health facility. Healthcare professionals who are culturally incompetent can misinterpret a patient’s symptoms, which can lead to a misdiagnosis and an ineffective treatment plan. The final intention of my survey was to help the facility begin an intervention to further educate the employees. My goal was to be able to discuss the results of the survey with the facility’s education department in hopes of beginning a cultural educational intervention for the healthcare professionals

Coarse types of tropical matroid polytopes

Describing the combinatorial structure of the tropical complex $C$ of a tropical matroid polytope, we obtain a formula for the coarse types of the maximal cells of $C$. Due to the connection between tropical complexes and resolutions of monomial ideals, this yields the generators for the corresponding coarse type ideal introduced in a recent paper of Dochtermann, Joswig and Sanyal (2010, preprint arXiv.org:1001.0237). Furthermore, a complete description of the minimal tropical halfspaces of the uniform tropical matroid polytopes, i.e. the tropical hypersimplices, is given.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Accounting and Business Law

This departmental history was written on the occasion of the UND Centennial in 1983.https://commons.und.edu/departmental-histories/1001/thumbnail.jp

Amyloid Precursor Protein And Insulin Homeostasis

Alzheimerâs disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease in which the brain progressively deteriorates resulting in cognitive decline, language impairment, diminished spatial awareness, memory loss and ultimately, death. AD is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease and the number of people afflicted by AD is expected to more than double in the next 30 years. AD is characterized in part by the formation of amyloid plaque deposits in the brain. It is known that these plaques are composed of the peptide Aβ, which aggregates as a function of age and is produced locally within the brain by cleavage of the Amyloid precursor protein (APP). It is now recognized that type 2 diabetes is a risk factor for the development AD and the AD brain has impaired insulin signaling. Transgenic mice lacking the APP gene show broad changes in metabolism, suggesting APP may play an important in regulating metabolic homeostasis. This dissertation consists of two central studies aimed at understanding the relationship between APP and insulin signaling. The first aim is to examine the role APP plays in plaque formation within the pancreas and to understand APPâs contribution to endocrine pancreas physiology. The second aim is to examine the role APP plays in the regulation of the Insulin Degrading Enzyme (IDE)

Elementary Speech Education: A Focus on Listening Instruction in Grades Four through Six

The purpose of this thesis was to develop a set of guidelines for listening instruction in grades four through six. The review of research focused on determining whether elementary speech education has changed over the years and whether guidelines and resources are currently available to support speech communication instruction in the elementary schools. In reviewing the research it became evident that throughout the years educators have agreed that there is a need for more speech communication instruction at the elementary level. It was found that the skill areas stressed in the 1970\u27s are different from those stressed in the 1940\u27s, however, there continued to be a lack of specific guidelines and learning resources to implement instruction. A significant source examined in the review was the book Communication Competence in Children, edited by Allen and Brown. They identified thirteen categories of speech communication instruction and thirty-five core objectives for use at the elementary school level. It was decided to select one category (listening and using core objectives related to listening, specific guidelines and learning resources were developed to facilitate listening instruction in the elementary school (grades four through six)

EFFECTS OF CO-PRODUCT USES ON ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY OF HYDROCARBON BIOFUEL FROM ONE- AND TWO-STEP PYROLYSIS OF POPLAR

This study investigated the environmental and economic sustainability of liquid hydrocarbon biofuel production via fast pyrolysis of poplar biomass through two pathways: a one-step pathway that converted poplar via fast pyrolysis only, and a twostep pathway that includes a torrefaction step prior to fast pyrolysis. Optimization of these fast pyrolysis-based biofuel processes were investigated through heat integration and alternative uses of the co-product biochar, which can be sold as an energy source to displace coal, soil amendment or processed into activated carbon. The impacts of optimization on the cost of hydrocarbon biofuel production as well as the environmental impacts were investigated through a techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA), respectively, with two-step and one-step processing compared to fossil fuels. The TEA indicates that a one-step heat integrated pathway with the production of activated carbon has a minimum selling price of $3.23/gallon compared to$5.16/gallon for a two-step heat integrated process with burning of the co-product biochar to displace coal. The LCA indicates that using the displacement analysis approach, a two-step heat integrated pathway had a global warming potential of -102 g CO2 equivalent/MJ biofuel compared to 16 CO2 equivalent/MJ biofuel for the heat integrated one-step pathway